Andrea Stella analyzes McLaren’s qualifying: execution, errors and battery issues complicated the session
The McLaren team faced a far more difficult qualifying at the Italian GP than expected. Oscar Piastri had secured third place, but a three-place penalty for impeding Liam Lawson dropped him to sixth. Meanwhile, Lando Norris will start only eighth.
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Behind these results, battery management issues played a significant role. Given that McLaren uses Mercedes power units, this raised concerns about a possible technical fault.
Andrea Stella firmly ruled out a hardware problem. “In Q3, with the issues we had, there was no connection to any hardware faults. It all depended on track position and battery management, with variables under our control and not caused by any malfunctioning hardware.”
The team principal also highlighted how vital every detail was at Monza. “Here, losing even 1% of battery charge costs a significant amount of milliseconds.”
Such a small margin can quickly translate to a notable lap time loss. However, energy management was not McLaren’s only challenge. Stella pointed out several execution errors during the weekend, starting with the impeding incident involving Piastri in Q2 that resulted in his penalty.
“From an execution standpoint, several factors played a part. In Q2, we had the impeding issue,” he explained.
Q3 was also imperfect. According to Stella, Norris dropped pace on his first attempt, while Piastri managed a very strong lap. During the final run, battery management problems and Piastri’s lock-up at the first corner affected their performance.
“In the final run, we found ourselves first and second. Then we had some battery management issues and Oscar locked up at turn one.” The overall balance was inevitably negative. “Overall, there are several areas where we didn’t perform to the level we should have.”
McLaren missed a big opportunity at Monza. After the penalty, Piastri will start sixth, with Norris eighth. Stella already knows that a near-perfect race will be required to make up for the qualifying setbacks.